Film Reviews

I was too young for Whitney-mania ('I Will Always Love You' finished its streak at No.1 the week I was born), but to my generation also she is always known as a massively talented individual. She is engrained as a purveyor of 'legacy' music, a voice and a performer that rightly became instantaneously legendary. Whitney dives into the star's rise and fall, filmmaker Kevin Macdonald's experience of Touching The Void surprisingly relevant for this painful tale of both Whitney's undeniable talents...

There is something undeniably beautiful about the lush greenery that surrounds the Pacific Northwestern city of Portland. It is here in a large public park that Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) live. Will is a war veteran who tries to escape the pressures of modern life and his PTSD through living in the wild. He is a very adept camper and they both live a comfortable existence in the woodlands. Perhaps inevitably, they are one...

Part-time sailor and full time wandering bum Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) runs across rugged older man Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin) while moving through Tahiti. The pair hit it off, and after some happy years together find themselves alone on a boat crossing the Pacific from Tahiti to San Diego. Hurricane Raymond strikes, and what should've been a pleasant sail becomes a desperate attempt at survival. While Adrift hits the beats in a workmanlike manner there isn't enough separating this true...

Isabel Coixet adapts The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name, in her latest Goya award-winning film. Coixet crafts an interesting film, one that curiously marshals satisfaction and frustration.  Despite its predictability, it remains ambitious in its scope, and touches on subjects that feel both timely and important. It’s 1959.  The location, a nondescript British coastal town, dreary, stiflingly small and populated by narrow-minded, conservative townsfolk.  Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a middle-aged widower whose husband was killed in the...

How do you approach making a follow up to a film that didn’t need a follow up? Do you stay true to the themes and tone of the original or forge a new path across the Mexican desert? Stefano Sollima’s Sicario 2: Soldado opts to stay true to what made the first film so unexpectedly brilliant. The preceding film had been a taught, atmospheric thriller as Denis Villeneuve guided the audience through two hours of miserable, brilliant action. The fact...

In his debut feature as director, actor Stephen Moyer (True Blood, The Double) offers a decently put together and beautifully acted family drama which seems to tick all the right boxes thematically, but sadly fails to completely convince due to its overwrought and slightly-too-meandering screenplay. Written by actor turned screenwriter Denis O’Hare (True Blood, American Horror Story), The Parting Glass follows a day in the life of a group of adult siblings and their father, as they come to terms...

Fatih Akin’s new German drama about a woman hellbent on seeking revenge after the murder of her family is a rather contrived, facile and at times overly melodramatic production that could have easily benefited from losing some schmaltz in favour of a more nuanced narrative. Staring Diane Kruger and co-written by Akin (Soul Kitchen, Goodbye Berlin) and screenwriter Hark Bohm, In The Fade presents an interesting enough premise, but sadly falls at the first hurdle by failing to come across...

Billy (Alex Lawther) is a flamboyant gay kid, largely estranged from his father (Larry Pine), until he has to move for the last year of high school when his beloved mother (Bette Midler) is ‘taken ill’. In a conservative school, Billy doesn’t fit in and is at one point beaten so badly that he ends up in a coma. When Billy recovers Flip (Ian Nelson), the high school football star he has become unlikely friends with, suggests that he tone...

One can’t help but feel that Sara Driver has missed an opportunity for a truly exciting and insightful documentary about one of the 20th century’s most interesting and revolutionary artists with her first film since her feature, When Pigs Fly. Although the title suggests an exploration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s later teenage years, Driver fails to deliver.  A majority of the films modest 78-minute runtime dedicates itself to exploring the emergence and proliferation of New York’s colourful art scene circa the...